


Not an unhappy ending

by M_Moonshade



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Depression, Drinking, Fanfiction of a Fanfiction, Gen, M/M, Platonic Cecil & Dana, an epilogue for my own sake because I need closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 00:01:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6493075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Moonshade/pseuds/M_Moonshade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My personal epilogue to Mixxy's Strange Captivation: </p>
<p>Cecil sends Carlos away to become a proper scientist and he marries Dana like a proper gentleman. It's not an unhappy ending. It's not. Really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not an unhappy ending

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Strange Captivation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061436) by [Mixxy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mixxy/pseuds/Mixxy). 



> (What is plot? What is characterization? What is dialogue? Certainly not any of this.)
> 
> Years ago, I fell in love with Mixxy's Strange Captivation, and it was tragically never finished. This has been how I always envisioned the story ending. It's partly closure, partly me loosening up after way too much time spent writing serious business things, and partly me easing myself back into writing Night Vale.

It wasn’t an unhappy ending.

Cecil married Dana. It was a small, but lovely ceremony. His mother smiled brighter than Cecil had ever seen her, and that was wonderful. She deserved to be happy. She deserved to be free of worry over the Palmer estate. Over him. And it was worth it, maybe, to see her smile that way.

Carlos wasn’t there.

During his abbreviated engagement, Cecil made arrangements for Carlos to apprentice under a prominent scientist in London—a biologist by the name of Mr. Thomas Henry Huxley. Cecil attended their first meeting, ready to argue to the man that Carlos deserved a chance. It was an unnecessary precaution. Like Carlos, Huxley had never had much of a formal education and was mostly self-taught. Within minutes the two scientists were friends. By the end of the hour, they were practically brothers. And Cecil was happy for Carlos. He was. Truly.

The fact that his happiness was tinted with jealousy—well, that was just a moment of weakness. Irrational and fleeting. It would pass.

On the day of the wedding, Carlos and Huxley were on a ship, heading to some far off place full of impossible animals and exciting new theories. It was a wonderful adventure. A fresh start. It was…

It was good.

And while Carlos made his fresh start, Cecil tried to do the same.

He couldn’t argue with his mother: Dana was an outstanding partner for him. Their wedding night was spent discussing their favorite scandalous books until the early hours of the morning, the ones they had never been able to properly dissect under the tutelage of their chaperones. She understood the management of the estate with an instinctive grace. As soon as he learned to follow her lead, their failing businesses began to boom. Their tenant farms burst into flower. There was trial and error, yes, but she learned quickly, and she had an unshakable faith in people that inspired a ruthless loyalty in return. On more than one occasion, Cecil had to physically restrain a servant from slugging the new Sherriff when they dared to insult the lady of the house. Cecil remembered the first time it happened, when Chad fidgeted and his eyes fell to the ground, mumbling humiliated apologies for his outburst. And he remembered the way Dana smiled at him, warm and sweet, and thanked the man for trying so hard to defend her honor—but not to worry, she could take care of herself.

And Cecil loved her, in that moment. Maybe not the way he was supposed to, not the way a husband should love his wife, but there was love in it. More than he’d ever seen his father express toward his mother. And maybe that was enough.

They were friends and compatriots. Confidants and companions. They spent endless hours in a library that grew every day, and they created little fantasy stories together of vicious tentacled librarians who guarded the ever-growing trove of books. Dana wrote stories about a young girl who defeated the beasts and saved an army of lost children, and published them anonymously. She followed it with a serial about a nameless narrator who scoured the globe searching for their long lost love, Alice. In confidence, she shared with Cecil that the narrator herself was a woman, and together they shared that small act of solidarity. The books were successful, for a while. At least until Dana published them again under her own name.

All her brilliant force of personality couldn’t help her when her enemies were hundreds of miles away. Some readers were outraged, claiming that they’d been tricked. There were booksellers who refused to carry her work on their shelves, saying it was indecent for a lady’s work to be displayed beside any man’s, unless he was her husband. So Cecil fought back with a book of his own.

And it was awful.

They were poems. Love poems, for the most part, too many of them based on Ovid’s Amores and Catullus 85 and secret conjugation in stolen moments alone. They were poems lavishing praises of their subject’s beauty and dignity and intelligence, of a person who brightened a room when they entered it and took away the sun when they left. He borrowed Dana’s trick of never mentioning the subject’s gender, and so it was largely assumed that the volume was written in homage to his beloved wife. And after a few titters, it was happily set on the shelf, forgotten beside the ever-expanding collection of Dana’s work. As the controversy over her gender fell away, she began to write in earnest—serious, non-fiction pieces about subjects that lesser mortals wouldn’t dare to touch. She visited strange and wondrous places, befriended armies of nomads in intricate masks, sponsored refugees from far-off lands. Sometimes she came back with bizarre stories and scars to prove them, but they did nothing to mar her beauty. It radiated off her like sunlight.

And Cecil was happy for her. This was what she deserved, and he was overjoyed to help her get it. Nothing brought him as much joy as seeing her face light up when she talked of her adventures. But between those moments of light, his world faded into gray. He tried to fight it off. He threw himself into the maintenance of the estate. He learned the names and birthdays and anniversaries of every servant and every tenant farmer, and he greeted them with familiar cheer. He listened to their problems and assisted in every way he could. Advocated for them in ways only Dana could do better. He even adopted a tomcat that had found its way into the bathroom one day.

And most days, he was… fine.

On others, dragging himself out of bed felt too insurmountable a task for a single lifetime. Getting dressed seemed too overwhelming to even try. On those days, he toyed with the idea of hiring a new valet to pull open the curtains and drag him out of bed and dress him—and then he promptly curled into a ball and hid under the sheets and hated himself for even thinking it.

He didn’t want a valet, he wanted Carlos. It was patently ridiculous. Carlos was off with Huxley, making amazing scientific discoveries and changing the world. He probably hadn’t thought of Cecil in years, and that made Cecil’s pining feel even more ridiculous.

_Grow up,_ he berated himself. _You’re married, and he’s happy. Everything’s perfect._

_Everything’s perfect._

He just had to keep telling himself that.

* * *

 

It was a matter of time before Dana found him out. Just a matter of time before she arrived home early, bright as the African sun and tan from all the time she’d spent underneath its rays. Meanwhile he was pale as the moon, nursing a bottle of gin inside a dark, quiet room.

“Cecil?” she approached carefully, like she didn’t believe the figure huddled in the corner could be her husband.

He cringed at the glaring light streaming through the open door and wriggled deeper into the shadows, like he could hide himself in the dark before she could find him. It didn’t work.

“Cecil, what is that—” she choked, and stopped her advance. The fumes of his drink stank on his breath and seeped from his pores. “God, Cecil. What are you doing in here?”

“Drinking?” he mumbled from his hiding place.

“No, this isn’t drinking,” she snapped. “Cecil, how much was in that bottle?”

“Not all that much. Just a bit. Just… um…” He tried to point it out, but the bottle swam before him. He tried to catch it, but it tumbled out of his hands and shattered on the wooden floor. “Shit. Lemme clean that up.”

“No!” She rushed forward, pulling his hand away from the glittering shards of broken glass. “Jeremy, Vithya, help me get him out of here before he cuts himself.”

Instantly two of the servants rushed forward, one gently pulling Cecil to his feet while the other carefully swept the glass shards away from their path.

“Vithya, did you know about this?” Dana demanded.

The servant stared helplessly at her employer. “Yes, ma’am.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I…” Vithya exchanged glances with Jeremy, who glanced briefly at Cecil. “I don’t know, ma’am. As long as I’ve been working here.”

“He hasn’t been gambling, your ladyship,” Jeremy added. “Or seeking disreputable company. And he’s never been violent, or even unfriendly. He’s just… sad, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Vithya said softly. “We thought you knew.”

“If you see something, say nothing,” Cecil slurred, reaching for a bottle that no longer existed. “And drink to forget.”

* * *

 

When Cecil was sober enough to realize what had happened, he was mortified.

This kind of behavior was beneath him. Worse, it was completely unfair to Dana. He’d tried so hard to do right by her, to be the kind of husband she deserved, to not be his god-damned father.

And if he couldn’t, then… well… at least she didn’t have to find out about it.

He tried to scrub the awful fuzzy feeling out of his parched mouth, he washed and fumbled over buttons and laces until he looked mostly presentable and absolutely not like a useless drunk caught mid-binge. He tried to compose himself. He tried to be calm, and reasonable, and self-assured. When that failed him, he tried to be charming.

By the time he reached the library, he settled on just being quiet. He could do that. God knew he’d had plenty of practice lately.

Dana was waiting for him, her normally warm smile hardened to into stone. No wonder that wandering army had taken to her so quickly; her natural face could become a mask in a heartbeat.

“Cecil,” she said quietly.

He sat meekly in the chair opposite hers, avoiding her eyes at all costs. She’d added at least a crate of new books to the library. He’d have to ask her about those. Maybe that would be a good distraction. Maybe they could talk about all the things she’d seen and learned, all the stories she’d heard and recorded and shared, and that would make her forget what she’d seen. Or maybe it would make him forget why he’d picked up the bottle in the first place.

Instead he stared blankly at the shelves.

“Cecil,” she said again. “What’s happening to you?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “It was just a…” A slip? It happened too regularly for that, and her talent for journalistic inquiry had probably uncovered that by now. “A bad habit. I’m sorry you had to see me that way. I’ll stop. You don’t have to worry about it happening every again. I swear.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” He didn’t need to look up to know Dana’s eyes were on him. He wanted to hide. “Cecil, are you alright?”

“Fine.” The answer was reflexive, so practiced it didn’t even feel like lying anymore. “Really.”

“Are you sure? Because you look miserable.”  

“It really is nothing,” he insisted. “I suppose I got a little bit lonely while you were away. Not that I don’t want you to go! I love how much you love it there. It’s really wonderful. You’re wonderful.” He floundered for something to say that would take that look off her face. “It’s just me being silly, no need to worry about it. Like I said, just a bad habit, nothing more.”

“Would you…. Would you like me to postpone my voyage to India?” she asked gently.

“No. No, of course not. Think of all the good you’ll do while you’re there. No, you absolutely have to go. I insist on it.”

“Then come with me,” she said. “It’s so much more fun when we’re together. And you had such a grand time when we toured the continent together.”

And they had, for the most part. He’d loved traveling abroad, seeing abandoned archways and quaint local taverns and sleeping in the too-small cabins on steep mountain ranges. It had all been wonderfully exciting.

“I just... I can’t,” he mumbled, looking at his hands.

“Why not?”

“Please.”

“Cecil—”

“I couldn’t do it, alright?” he snapped, louder and sharper than he’d intended. His hands shook almost as hard as his voice. “I couldn’t keep going from place to place not knowing if he’d just _be there_ when I turned the corner. I couldn’t keep walking past news sellers and wondering if I’d hear about his arrival in the paper. I just couldn’t take it anymore. At least here, I know for sure that I wouldn’t—that he—that— oh, damn.”

He buried his face in his hands.

This was why he’d avoided telling her so long. She was a reporter at heart, and that meant she couldn’t help but pry. She only meant to help, and he knew it. But some wounds weren’t meant to be picked at, if they were ever to heal. And this one _would_ heal eventually, if he just gave it time. That was all he needed. More time, and more distractions, and maybe a lot more alcohol.

“I’m sorry, Dana,” he whispered between his palms. “I’m sorry. I just… I can’t.”

He’d done so well until now. He hadn’t even alluded to Carlos since that damn book, and that had been ages ago.

Voicing it now felt pathetic—worse, it felt like a betrayal. Dana deserved better than this. And yet here he was. Here he had always been. And no matter what he did or how he tried, he’d never be able to move on.

But Dana was a good partner for him, even if he couldn’t be one for her. And she wrapped her arms around him and held him until his shaking fell still and his sobs fell silent.

“It’s alright,” she whispered to him, smoothing his hair. “It’s alright. I promise, things will get better.”

Days passed. Soon Dana would have to leave on her voyage to India. She’d offered again to postpone her journey, but Cecil insisted. This was what made her happy; he’d sworn a thousand times never to stand in her way, not even now.

Still she insisted on taking care of him from afar. If managing the estate didn’t leave time for an occupation, then perhaps Cecil could invest some time into a hobby. Other families provided patronage to the arts and sciences; surely they could do the same. She’d even found a promising candidate who needed a workshop.

“I met him on the voyage back from Africa,” she explained as she led him down the stairs to the drawing room. “We whiled away plenty of hours on deck discussing stories and politics and all sorts of things. So you won’t ever be lacking for conversation.”

“I don’t doubt you,” Cecil said.

“If you’d like, I’m sure he’d be happy in the guest house. But there are so many empty rooms here, and I think you would enjoy the company.”

“And I appreciate it. Really, I do. But Dana—”

He opened the door, and his train of thought derailed entirely.

There were no servants in the drawing room, no lawyers, no one except for a lone figure with dark, delicate skin and broad shoulders and teeth like a military cemetery.

He rose to his feet with that familiar, almost ethereal poise. His hand curled in front of him, like he wanted to reach out. “Cecil?”

Cecil thought his heart would break all over again. He didn’t trust himself to speak. One word and he’d give himself away. One word and he’d ruin everything.

Behind him, Dana cleared her throat. “I trust the two of you don’t need introductions.”

_Why would you bring him here?_ Cecil did not ask. _Why would you do this to me?_

“As I was saying, there’s plenty of room for you to put together a laboratory, Carlos. Anything you need will, naturally, be provided for. I want you to be happy here.” She said it with a particular weight, like she wasn’t saying it just to Carlos. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to consult with Vithya about the details of my trip. I hope you two will keep each other occupied.”

Before she left, she stopped short and wrapped her arms around her husband.

“You gave me my freedom, Cecil,” she whispered into his ear. “Now I’m giving you yours.”


End file.
